


we are savages, you and i (and we will hang)

by voodoochild



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Aunt/Nephew Incest, Catholic Guilt, Cunnilingus, F/M, Hand Jobs, Hurt/Comfort, Older Woman/Younger Man, Porn Battle, Religion Kink, background Tommy/Grace, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 01:45:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1167142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He won't get on his knees, except for her. [Post-ep for 1.06, in which there's a fallout from the events of that episode. Spoilers abound.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are savages, you and i (and we will hang)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle XV: The Ides of Porn. Also written for Ceebee, as a very belated birthday present, because she is awesome. Title from the Indelicates' "Savages".
> 
> Note: Spoilers go up to the S1 finale, and include my speculation about what may have taken place after the cliffhanger. I'm not Steven Knight or anyone connected to the show, just fannish guessing here.

He won't get on his knees, except for her.

Her Thomas believes in nothing and no one but himself and his family, and yet he still has that need to confess in him. Mary had converted, same as Polly had, gone Catholic in an attempt to shed slurs of "pikey bitch" and "didicoy whore", and had instilled in her children the faith that would make them respectable. All of the children had believed, once. 

And then came France, then came things none of the boys will speak of, and if Arthur and John could still bend the knee and confess their sins, Tommy couldn't bring himself to do the same. It eats away at him, sometimes, she can see it. The reflexive crossing of himself when he enters a church. The bowing of his head when he admits to wrongdoing - never mind it's for the sake of the family, he still knows right from wrong. 

He needs a way to let it out. So it wasn't a shock to see him slip into her room one night - it was barely two weeks after they'd come home from France - bloodstains still painted across him despite the rain, and kneel beside her bed, asking her just to listen.

He had confessed to her, as plain as if she'd been in a latticed box with a cassock on. 

It was simple; kneel for her, confess to her, and await her judgment. If she forgave him, he would get to his feet, kiss her cheek, and go down the hall to his room to sleep. If she didn't forgive him, she would have to punish him, because you can't chastise a man like her Tommy and not give him consequences for his actions. There were times she would make him sit up all night and think about what he did. Other nights, it was her belt, his trousers around his ankles like he was Finn's age and not a man grown. Even had to turn him out once or twice and let his demons get the best of him, remind him that he had to be stronger for her, for the family.

Polly doesn't want to stand in judgment of anyone - that's not up to her - but when it comes to the family, they'd all hardened themselves enough to survive. She's just better at it than the rest, because there are things she still won't tell any of her nephews or her niece about, things worse than stolen children and two cups of pennyroyal tea. When it comes to her family, she is judge, jury, and if need be, executioner.

And it works for two years, through the Flanders Blues and shell shock and his brothers falling apart and his sister marrying a Communist and guns he shouldn't have stolen and bombs wired to their car - until finally, there's a barmaid, golden and pretty enough to blind him to her faults. Tommy falls in love with her, and her salvation is that she falls for him in return, but it isn't enough. That barmaid whispers into a copper's ear, comes away with an engagement ring and a promotion instead of thirty pieces of silver, and it's almost the ruin of them all. 

Polly has taught her boy to be cold and cruel, to trust only kin, and now he sees what happens when he isn't.

There's a shooting. Two people end up dead, and she doesn't dare ask if the girl is one of them. People aren't talking, and that tells her coppers are involved. That night, there's a knock on her door and a shattered, shaking Tommy coming in to fall to his knees at her feet. He buries his face in her stomach, the hot dampness soaking through her nightdress betraying him, and she strokes at the shorn back of his head. 

"What did you do, Thomas?" she asks. Soft. Liturgical. "What happened?"

He may be weeping, but his voice doesn't break. 

"She was waiting for me at the train station. Asked me to run with her - go to New York for a fresh start. I thought about it, I did. I could have gone . . . that's a lie. It is. I want it to be true, but it isn't." She waits him out, cards her fingers through his hair. He swallows, tight and shaking, and shakes his head. "I won't be Dad. No matter the reason, a man shouldn't abandon his family."

She doesn't want to ask him, doesn't even know if she wants the answer. "You had nothing else holding you here?"

"Don't say that. Stayed for you, Pol. For the family. Shelby Brothers Limited and everything we've built." He draws in a breath, thready enough that she strokes softly at his hair, and he lets out the breath slow and even. "I was going to see her, to tell her I couldn't leave, say a proper goodbye. I heard a shot. Campbell turned his gun on himself, but Moss was there too, and drew on Grace. Shot her - I couldn't see what happened, but I got him in the back. Moss and Campbell were dead, she was just gone."

His arms wrap tight around her waist, and he looks up at her - scared, she thinks, for the first time in a long time. She cups his jaw, strokes down his neck and hushes him. 

"Will you look for her?"

He turns blindly against her stomach again, hiding his face in the cotton of her nightdress. Breathes in slow and shaky and won't look at her when he responds. 

"No. If I start, I won't stop, and all I'll do is ruin myself and the rest of us with me. Need to think about what's next, working to build off what's left of Kimber's holdings, go south into London."

"But not tonight," she says, soothing the tension in his shoulders. "Do you hear me, Thomas? None of it tonight. Put it out of your head, Grace and Kimber, your heart and business - you're letting it eat away at you, and I won't have it."

He whines through his teeth, a sharp sound that sets all her nerves on edge - it's what he sounds like when he's holding on to the edges of his control, because there are other nights they never speak of. His hand over her mouth, her legs hitched around his waist, careful careful, don't rattle the bed, don't scream too loud, don't wake anyone. She's damned for it, she knows, lusting after her sister's son, and the only way she thinks it might even out in the book of judgment is that she doesn't lust alone. Since nearly the day he turned fifteen, too pretty by fucking half and full of the devil, he'd looked at her the way a man looks at a woman he wants to bed. Since before he'd known what those thoughts meant.

"Too much in my head already," he says. "It's already torn enough of me apart. I want it to stop, and it never stops."

She traces her fingertips over the back of his head, stroking up, against the grain of his hair. "Tried that pipe of yours?"

He laughs bitterly. "I'm out of opium, and I can't go down to Zhang's until morning to get more. Whiskey won't do anything - Christ, Polly, *please*. Don't make me beg."

She inhales sharply, and while she hopes he can't tell how affected she is, he's pressed too tightly to her not to. He spreads his fingers out on her waist, his palm nearly covering from stomach to arse, and strokes his thumb against her hipbone. Presses his mouth just under her breasts, then a few inches lower, working his way down her belly. His breath is teasingly hot through her nightdress, and she can feel her resolve melting, how badly they want each other balancing out any other objections.

Her hands push at his shoulders, and he draws away with a low groan. She stays him on his knees in front of her, trailing her fingers across his cheeks. "You don't have to beg, but you'll ask for what you want."

"Let me put my mouth to you. Kiss your breasts, lick you right out, anything you like. Tell me what you want and I'll do it. Don't let me think about it, just make me do it."

She nearly loses her balance for the growl in his voice, the desperation in him; it almost takes her knees out from under her, and she sits down shakily on the bed. Curls her nails into the sheets as she takes a breath and looks down at his bowed head, his tense shoulders. Beautiful, sweet boy, and all she's ever wanted is to ease his lot a little. See him make more of himself than he started with.

"I'll have your tongue, Thomas," she says, pulling at the lace to her nightdress, drawing it over her head and lying back against the pillows. "Start with my mouth and work your way down. Don't feel that you need to take your time, you can indulge yourself once you've made me come."

He hisses through his teeth as he opens his eyes, pushes to his feet and lies down on the bed beside her. This would never work in his bed, barely room for two in it, though they've made do, curled tightly into each other, her resting on top of him. Her bed - the one she bought to replace That Bastard's bed that her sister died in - caused whispers and scandal when the boys carried the mattress and wood in, put it together for her. Big enough for three or four, not that she's tried, and Tommy wriggles out of his shirt and trousers.

Gathering her to him, sighing softly for her fingernails tracing gently over the lines of his tattoos - Christ, you'd think he were a sailor, not a soldier, but they suit him - he winds his fingers in her hair and kisses her. His mouth is soft, lush, and he nips at her lower lip, urges her to open for him. She shivers for the heat of his tongue against hers, the small noises he's making into her mouth. She smooths her hands more firmly over his shoulders, and moans as he sucks at her lower lip. He breaks away, pressing small kisses to her cheek, her jaw, stroking at the fall of her hair and shifting her to her back to look down at her.

It's the look in his eyes that takes her breath away, every single time.

Pure. Honest. Even a little sweet. As if he never wants to stop looking at her. As if she were bloody everything he'd ever wanted, and all she has to do is touch him. He's always been like this with her, ever since that first time, shaking as he touched her, swearing and panting as she put him on his back, sunk down on him. 

He bends to touch his mouth to her collarbone, kisses her skin and presses short little nips down to the tops of her breasts. She'd snap at him for it - hates being teased or treated too gently, and he knows it - but the desperate moans that start low in his throat keep her silent. He needs this more than she does, though she runs her hands urgently over his back, breathes "more, more" as she arches against him. His mouth closes over the tip of one breast, sucking slow and wet enough to make her cry out.

"That's good, sweetheart," she says, shifts insistently underneath him. He has to work to earn her praise - she once made him put his mouth to her cunt four separate times because he didn't make her come quickly enough - but on nights like these, she goes much easier on him.

"Telling me you're satisfied with just 'good'?" His smile is lopsided, the way it used to be when he'd play a trick on Arthur or sneak biscuits from the kitchen. She hasn't seen it like that in a long time. "Next you'll tell me you don't want this."

"Oh, you can keep your mouth just where it is. And if you move upwards, I'll box your ears."

He laughs softly, strokes his thumbs down her stomach to rest on her hips, and she arches sharply for the heat of his tongue on her breast. The heat trails down her stomach, where he presses deliberately-slow kisses, her breath coming faster and needier. She palms the back of his head, dragging her nails up the shaven underside, and tugs at his hair, urges him lower.

Not that it's much of a battle; she wants his mouth on her cunt, and he's never opposed to the idea. When he's like this, desperate and sweet, she can barely drag his mouth away. His hands spread her open as he puts his mouth to the soft skin of her inner thigh, leaves a chain of red marks from his tongue and his teeth. She cries out for him sucking just near the crease of her thigh, his fingers tightening their grip for how she's thrashing against him. She'll have bruises the precise size of his hands and she'll savor every twinge from them.

She always does.

"Come on, come on, you know what I want, you little bastard - put your mouth to me, do it-"

"Don't rush me," he growls, pressing his mouth to her other thigh, kissing at the skin there. "You'll have what you want, but let me take my time."

She feels electric with it, feels wanton - spread out in her bed with not a stitch on, cunt bared to anyone who cared to look, with a man half her age between her legs - and she fists one hand in the bedsheets, tangles the other in his hair. 

"Told you not to take your time." She tugs his hair, turns his head toward her waiting cunt. "Told you to make me come screaming. You know I don't like to repeat myself."

He presses a hard kiss right to her clit, drags his tongue against it in a slow lick that has her sighing and shivering. His eyes are dark as they look up at her. "Bossy bitch. I'll tie your hands one of these days."

There's no response to that, not when his mouth's back on her, even though she'd like to laugh and tell him to do it. She's too lost in sensation, the wet heat of his tongue against her, the iron grip his hands have on her. He sucks at her clit without her even having to demand it - other nights, he'll draw it out, make her tell him in excruciating detail and order just what she wants, but tonight, he gives her everything she'd want. Desperate about it, hungry, licking at her like she's better than anything he's ever tasted. Her fingers tangle into his hair, knotting the soft strands, and she rocks her hips up helplessly. No one gets to her like Tommy does, and she thinks in her more maudlin moments that in some other world, they were lovers in daylight, too. His tongue is soft, wet against her, and she lets the pleasure carry her. Sometimes she fights - sometimes she has to, needs to push herself, can't let anyone see her cracked-open and vulnerable - but he's different. 

She remembers Tommy clawing at the wallpaper of his bedroom three days after coming back from France. Remembers kneeling in the middle of her living room, her children gone. They've seen each other ripped to shreds, at the bottom of more holes than they could keep count of. Nothing could be worse than that.

This is a gift, this time with him. She doesn't regret a single second of it, and of the many, many sins she needs absolution for, he isn't one of them. 

He breaks away to catch his breath a moment, breathes "give it up, Pol, do it for me", and her hands tighten in his hair. Strokes against the grain of the shaven underside, makes him groan against her and suck at her clit the way she likes. It builds and builds in her, twisting low in her belly, making her drip against his mouth, and her mouth opens in spite of herself.

"I'd let you," she pants, head thrown back, hips working in tight circles. "Not a man alive I'd let tie me down, but I'd let you. You'd never hurt me, lovely boy, you'd make it so good."

A long, slow drag of his mouth against her clit, and she bites down on the side of her fist against a scream. She must sound shocking, the way he's shivering against her, hands held fast to her hips. It isn't long before the pleasure crests, before her vision goes white with it and she swears viciously as she comes. Her breathing echoes in the bedroom, a dozen ragged breaths while he soothes her back down, his mouth pressing soft kisses to her thighs, her belly.

"Beautiful," he says, and she shivers for his fingers trailing through the slickness on her thighs. "Been too fucking long, eh? For both of us."

"Come up here."

His breath catches, but he obeys, straddling her hips. His cock rubs against her, sweet and aching, and she kisses the taste of herself off his mouth. Most women wouldn't dream of it, but cunt tastes a damn sight better than most spunk, and anyway, it drives Tommy mad. He groans desperately, ruts against her belly as he bites at her lower lip. Her hand encircles him nearly the same time as his own, and he bucks sharp and rhythmic into their grip. Most times he can take it slower, wait to fuck her, let her use her mouth on him, but other times, like tonight, he's too keyed-up. 

"That's it, sweetheart, you're almost there."

"God, I'm sorry, I wanted to do it properly-"

"There's time for that later. I'm not going anywhere." Kisses him deep and filthy, sucking his lip, working him with her hand, and the way he whines and arches for her just takes her breath away. His eyes close, and she can feel the telltale desperation in his body. "Come on, Thomas. Let it go. I've got you."

He gasps against her neck, comes shivering and hot into their hands, and she cleans them up with his discarded vest. He lies heavy against her until she urges him onto his back, curls into him and sighs for his soft breath against her hair. She can tell he needs to say something to her, and she waits him out, relishing the simple pleasure of his skin next to hers.

"Do you forgive me?" he asks finally. "For endangering us all, letting Grace so close and not seeing what she was?"

"For being blinded by your heart? That's not mine to forgive - that's a weakness in a man that makes him stronger. Nothing to forgive, so long as you learn from it. Be more careful with your love, and keep it out of this business of ours."

He's quiet, but he shifts her atop his chest, looking her in the eye. "Is that what you did?"

She swallows, throat tight; bright blue eyes and a stern jaw and a scar to the temple still fresh in her memory even after all these years. She'd known Michael wasn't long for a family - you can't tie a man like him, like Tommy, down for much time - but she'd wanted to try. And then India, run off to soldier without a care for the wife and children he left behind, after which she didn't dare let anyone too close.

"No life for the likes of us, my boy. We're too bloody busy keeping ourselves and the rest of the family out of the poorhouse. You've got plans, I know you do, and I'll see that they come to life. It's a hell of a lot less lonely when you've got a roof over your head and your family safe, I'll tell you that."

He reaches out to stroke her cheek, twines his fingers around her curls, and she sighs as she shifts closer to him. He's always been like a furnace, and she sinks into the warmth. His fingers trail through her hair as he brushes a kiss against her mouth.

"You always kept us safe, Pol. I won't do any less."


End file.
